Jul 19 2008
This site provides writing advice. If you're writing a superhero novel or comic book, please also read our superhero writing articles.
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I just got back from an art show where I was most impressed by the landscapes of Amy Taylor.
Jul 03 2008
When authors or fans challenge negative reviews, they sometimes say something like “what have you written, because I bet it’s awful.” I think that reflects a fundamentally wrong conception of reviewing. Every day, people evaluate and suggest things without any experience of having made them. For example, over the past few years I’ve suggested that friends stay away from (ugly) Pontiac Azteks, (shoddy) Craftsman tools, and (inedible) McDonald’s food. But I’ve never designed a car, built a tool and hardly ever cook. Does my lack of experience disqualify me as a relevant reviewer?
Jun 05 2008
This article will help you create and develop characters.
Continue Reading »
May 31 2008
In this article, Jacob walks you through how to illustrate speech and thought bubbles for comic books, webcomics and header art. He also has a few free samples for your convenience.
May 29 2008
On May 29, we replaced our old header. We recount the changes and explain some of the editing changes we’ve made along the way below.
May 29 2008
Here are a few tips to help you write better origin stories for characters in superhero novels and comic books. Continue Reading »
May 20 2008
This article will teach you how to change the space between paragraphs, create internal links, add footnotes, and a few other tricks applicable to WordPress.
Continue Reading »
May 01 2008
Some starting authors expect that their work is over when their manuscript gets picked up by a publisher. No, not even close. Once the book is published, it falls largely to the author to market his work by running promotional events like book-signings.
Learning to host an effective book-signing is as crucial for authors as a good hand-shake is for a politician. Here is some advice on how to hold an effective promo event. Continue Reading »
Apr 30 2008
Authors, particularly new and unproven ones, have to use promotional events to drive sales. Google Analytics can provide useful information about which cities are worth promoting in. The conventional wisdom is probably that the most readers for the typical book can be found in large cities (NYC, Chicago, LA…) But you can probably do a lot better than just hitting up large cities.
For example, we’ve tabulated our numbers for January 2008 and found that Atlanta and Toronto currently have almost as many Superhero Nation readers as NYC.
Apr 28 2008
Oiur resident political scientist plays with the numbers and concludes that Hillary Clinton could very well end up winning the popular vote.
Apr 24 2008
Here are several quotes from the book Soon I Will be Invincible. Which character says them? You have three choices: a mutant cat created in a lab accident, a genius millionaire turned businessman and a whiny teen idol. If you expect this will be easy, you obviously haven’t read SIWBI.
“This is all geek stuff.”
“Maybe you should be at work, then. Spend some time on the streets.”
“He always looks fine. I know you two kept in touch.”
“Darkness? Crime, you mean.”
“You honestly think there’s something behind this.”
“We haven’t seen a serious threat for almost a year. I’m almost bored.”
The first four are from the mutant cat and the last two are from the genius businessman. If you’re wondering why a mutated cat would use phrases like “geek stuff,” you’re not alone. I’d like to note that none of these lines actually came from the whiny teen idol, but most of them sound like they should have.
(You can read our much longer SIWBI review here).
Apr 24 2008
This article will help you organize the plotline of your story or novel.
Apr 14 2008
I highly recommend Selling the General, a wacky (and free!) short story about a publicist that works for a genocidal dictator. Its characters are strange enough to be funny but normal enough that you can relate to them on some level.
STG is well-written and have I mentioned that it’s free?
Apr 13 2008
On April 14, we did our monthly header change. (Note: this post is actually dated April 13– we always date our non-comedy posts a day off so that our top post is always comedy).
Here, glance at the two headers and see if you can spot what’s changed.
Original
Revision
The main change is a slight edit to our caption, from “…guide to superhero politics” to “superhero comedy.” I think “politics” scares potential readers and most of our posts aren’t political. Also, I think that people naturally associate “politics” with “propaganda” rather than comedy, entertainment or anything that would encourage them to stick around. So politics had to go.
This looks like a minor change. If I showed the original to 100 people and then showed them the new version 10 minutes later, maybe 5 would realize what was changed. But I suspect that this will significantly reduce our bounce-rate (5-10%). People are quite good at appreciating differences, even if they don’t consciously realize what they’re doing. I’ll release preliminary Google Analytics results in a week to show whether it’s had an impact. Over the past week, our BR was in the mid-to-high 60s.
By comparison, Google Analytics says that Comics and Animation sites have an average BR in the mid-40s. I suspect that we’ll remain worse than average for some time. Our site is very eclectic. Our audience is highly fragmented between sports buffs, politicos, online entrepreneurs and writing aficionados. When I write articles on, say, designing effective header art, someone who’s casually interested in comedic content is going to bounce. Even the the ISS limits its offerings to comedy, although it also makes tangents into sports and politics.
Other Header Modifications
Kudos if you picked out these aesthetic changes. The heroes have gotten a bit bigger and more spaced-out. Catastrophe’s face is a bit more evenly purple. The blue portions of the US flag are a bit brighter.
It looks like Catastrophe’s face is wider and rounder. It’s not, but we see a wider cut of it because I moved Agent Black (the white guy).
Other Modifications
At the same time I changed the header, I also changed our WWSGD plug-in. Before, new visitors to our site were greeted by this message at the top of the screen. “Superhero Nation is a wacky comedy site devoted to a superhero novel, sports and politics.”
I changed that to “Superhero Nation is a wacky comedy site and novel about New York’s second-most inept superhero and a Homeland Security agent that might not be a mutated alligator.
In addition, we are the world’s #1 provider of Lol Gators and occasionally offer noncomedic articles on creative writing, business planning and market analysis, visual design and marketing. In fact, we may be the only site anywhere to offer these things in addition to Lol Gators.”
Apr 09 2008
These six character traits will probably make your readers groan… but they don’t have to! Find out how to turn self-guilt, rebelliousness, moral perfection, dishonesty and intelligence into winning character traits.
Apr 07 2008
Over the past few days, our bounce-rate has spiked upwards from about 58% to about 70% and the average time-per-viewer has dropped by about 45% (ouch). The only significant change I can think of is that we moved to Wordpress 2.5 over that time. I haven’t noticed any major formatting problems on my computer, but if you’ve seen something that looks hard to read or otherwise weird, please let us know by leaving a comment or e-mailing us at superheronation_at_gmail.com (replace _at_ with @, of course).
Thanks for your help!
Apr 06 2008
I think I have stumbled onto something really useful about writing character-voice. I’ll post some notes later today, but my thesis is that distinct phrases are crucial.
Apr 02 2008
I have overhauled my review of Soon I Will Be Invincible. I cut its length by about a quarter (from 2750 to about 2000 words). It is now down to a hair over 2000 words (instead of ~2750) and Davis was kind enough to reformat it for me.
